Coleman’s attorneys said that depending on what the court decides, they would be ready to file a legal action contesting the recount results as early as Tuesday. Recount attorney Fritz Knaak said that he believed 300 to 400 ballots would go Coleman’s way in a contest, including through the addition of absentee ballots so far excluded and the elimination of so-called “double votes” in Minneapolis.

“We are prepared to go forward and take whatever legal action is necessary to … remedy this artificial lead that we believe is being shown now for the Franken campaign,” Knaak said.

Let’s say, for the unlikely sake of argument, that the Minnesota Supreme Court agrees with Coleman’s claim and that 46 votes “lost” were, in fact, wrongly given to Franken. Let’s also allow Coleman the dubious charge that 100 votes for Franken in Minneapolis were “double-counted”. So that’s, what, 146 votes we should toss out?

Fine, that still leaves Franken ahead by 79 votes.

So why won’t Coleman do the honorable thing, the thing he promised, and concede to “help the healing process” now that everyone but his lawyers have said he’s lost? Two possible reasons come to mind.

It’s possible that Coleman can’t believe he actually lost, that he’s in denial. There’s certainly despair over this turn of events in the rightwing blogosphere, but I have a hard time believing that a sitting senator can be so delusional that he refuses to see the evidence staring him in the face. These guys live off of polls and votes; they know how the game works and should be able to see when they’ve lost.

No, the more likely (and more cynical) reason Coleman refuses to concede is one snippet of Minnesota law that states that no election can be certified as official as long as there are legal challenges to its legitimacy. So what does that mean? Simple, as long as Coleman can drum up fake outrage and legal challenges to Senator Franken’s election the democrat’s will be down a seat come vote-time. This may not help Coleman (directly), but it certainly helps the GOP in Washington.

And so Coleman sues, and we all get a repeat of Florida 2000. We all know who the winner is, let’s hope that this time around the courts and the media refuse to play ball with GOP school-yard tactics.